Weekly Rewind #6

A quick look at my watch tells me it’s Weekly Rewind time again so here comes a round up of what I got up to this week. It all started on Monday when I recorded an interview with Matt Lee of the FSF for Linux Outlaws. We talked for about half an hour and it came out really well I think, you can hear the results in episode 82 of the podcast. One thing that came out of the discussion was licensing and it really made me think. I’ve tended to just use the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commerical Share Alike 3.0 license for everything in the past and never thought too much about it. It seems though that the NC clause makes it incompatible with the GPL and it’s not considered a free license by the FSF. This came as something of a shock to me but I suppose it’s my own ignorance for not really considering the implications. I was worried about people charing money for my work when I release it for free and I’d like it kept that way. The NC clause does protect from that but in practice this isn’t really how it works. It prevents anyone who has a commercial interest of any sort from using my material, not necessarily just selling it as such but perhaps playing one of my songs on the radio or including something I’ve done in a magazine. In light of this I’ve re-licensed this very blog under BY-SA and I shall use this license for most of my future works. It was quite a learning experience and I suppose the main thing I’ve realised is not to just choose any license quickly, instead put proper consideration into it. Anyway, we recorded and also streamed the rest of episode 82 that evening.

On Tuesday I wrote an article about unetbootin and also spent some time editing our interview together from the various recordings. I had hoped to go and see John Adams talk at Manchester Free Software in the evening but sadly I was too ill. My cold was still getting the better of me and I felt too drowsy to drive over there and back safely. I will make it to one of their meetings soon though by hook or by crook. On Wednesday I continued to edit our interview which was quite some feat in the end because I was synchronising 3 channels of audio instead of the normal 2. I had local recordings of myself and Fab as always but also a recording of Matt from the SFLCAsterisk server. Audacity really came into it’s own here for synchronising and moving things around easily with 3 tracks, it was easier than any commercial audio software I’ve used. I must say another big thanks to Bradley for allowing us to use their server, recording the call and generally just being so helpful to us.

Quickcam Communicate Deluxe

I did some work on my Debian article and also published the slides from my Think Visibility talk on Thursday, then continued writing, preparing screenshots and doing general jobs on Friday. I also bought myself a new webcam and after a bit of a false start I finally got one which works easily under Linux. I bought the Logitech Quickcam Communicate Deluxe and I highly recommend it to any other Linux users looking for a webcam. It wasn’t expensive at under £20 including postage and getting it to work is as simple as plugging it in, happy days. Some people like to compile drivers manually and play with modprobe all day but I can’t say I missed the pain at all, massocists. I’ve been having a play with Ustream and getting things ready to broadcast live video of our next Linux Outlaws recording so you’ll be able to see me as well as Fab. Prepare yourselves people I’m not a pretty sight, don’t say I didn’t warn you ok.

I finally published the big honking Debian Lenny review very late last night after lots of editing and fine tuning but I think it came out pretty well. I’ve had some nice comments already which is always satisfying.

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Upcoming:

linuxoutlaws.com

Tomorrow I’ll record and stream Linux Outlaws 83 complete with video I hope at linuxoutlaws.com/live but I can’t give you a set time yet. It should be around tea time in the UK, 4pm ish. It’ll all be announced in advance on our Identi.ca account so keep an eye out for that. On Wednesday I’m going over to the FACT building for a talk about Drupal, WordPress and Plone, I’ll also take my little H4 recorder and try to get some decent audio from the event. Thursday night is Chester LUG which I hope to get along too. I’ll see you there if you’re going, details can be found on the website. Then finally on Saturday I’ll be heading to Manchester for the Oekonux Peer Production Conference where I’m particularly interested in a 12pm talk about the involvement of women in Free Software projects by Christina Haralanova, again, I’ll take my recorder. It should be an interesting week and I’ll report back with all the juicy gossip for you next Sunday. Till then, take care everyone.